Life has gone on since 9/11/01 -- but there's always something reminding us.

The day Osama Bin Laden died, I learned one of my former Marines was permanently blind. He was recovering from an IED strike and I'd called to check in. Months back they'd said his vision loss was temporary. As it turned out, he'd regained peripheral vision, but no more. The Corps had trained him as a journalist. Now he couldn't read.

Three hours later I learned Bin Laden was dead: news that should have felt like closure, but didn't. One of my Marines was blind, and though I wanted to tie in Osama's death and 9/11 to make sense of it, I couldn't.

When he was hit, he was in Afghanistan as part of President Obama's surge. That strategy was predicated on the success of the Iraq surge, itself an outgrowth of previous Iraq policy. Further muddling things, the Iraq war necessitated the drawdown in Afghanistan in 2003, which shaped the environment where my Marine was injured.

These policies didn't derive solely from 9/11. They derived from presidential leadership, and the will of the American people. And though the specter of 9/11 might have been used to justify those policies, we shouldn't confuse the complex legacy of 9/11 with 9/11 itself.

That day 3,000 people died, a number that for many Americans is as abstract as our 37,000 yearly traffic fatalities, but for New Yorkers it is not abstract at all. We knew the dead. We know the still suffering living. For one friend, 9/11 is the day his mother came home covered in ash and wouldn't talk about it for months. For another, it's what turned her first responder father into a different, sadder man.

Sept. 11 was the Hasidic men and children handing out bottles of water to people fleeing Manhattan over the Williamsburg Bridge. It was the man who bought coffee for a young, exhausted cop, only to see the cop break down crying. It was the days after — all those 9/12s. The pictures in the subway, "Have you seen my brother?" "Have you seen my daughter?" For New Yorkers, it's personal.

The specter of 9/11, though, is as impersonal as an airport body scan. It's not an individual story, but a vague sense of approaching doom. It's a somber ghost hanging over our national discourse, unassailable, draped in a tattered U.S. flag, and repetitively moaning about America under attack.

I'm a New Yorker. My parents took me to the top of the twin towers when I was a child. After 9/11, I walked to Ground Zero at night and saw twisted metal and fog, but no clear way to help. Within three years I'd joined the Marine Corps. Within six, I was in Iraq. There I saw Marines work tirelessly to heal the damage done by sectarian divisions, but I came home to a nation where the specter of 9/11 has taken us in the other direction. We're so frightened we make American Muslims endure months of spurious legal challenges before they can build a mosque, and more than a dozen states are considering legislation opposing sharia law.

When my Marine told me he was blind, I focused on his loss. He looked to the future. This year, he might make staff sergeant. And for next year, he's challenged me to a grappling match. The other day he told me he's been working out. Apparently, I'm in trouble. None of this means he's forgotten the day of his injuries, or the sacrifices of his fellow Marines, but his life doesn't revolve around them any more than ours should revolve around 9/11.

If you go to downtown Manhattan, you'll see Ground Zero. But you'll also see a vibrant neighborhood coalescing around the scars. This is as it should be. New York has recovered, though the specter of 9/11 continues to haunt the nation at large. Perhaps with the 10th anniversary of 9/11, we'll be able to exorcise it for good.

Klay is a veteran of the Iraq war. His latest work appears in "Granta 116: Ten Years Later."